Review of Sing "Yesterday" for Me

Everyone reaches crossroads in their life. You have nowhere to go but forward, but you hesitate. Which road will you take? Who will you meet at the intersection before moving on? Rikuo Uozumi is stuck. A college graduate with no future goals and a dead-end job. His friends have begun their lives as adults, leaving him behind. Throughout Sing Yesterday for Me, he encounters other stuck people. Shinako, his old friend from school and now a full-time teacher, struggles to move on from a loved one’s death. The two reconnect when she comes back to town for a local job. She seemingly always had a visionfor her future, Rikuo admires that. He conflates his desire to find purpose with his unrequited love for Shinako. After he confesses to her early on, her choice to just stay friends is for the best because until Rikuo figures himself out. You’d expect them to both grow as people and come together, but that was not the case. There is no real growth, and what we get is artificial at best. Sing Yesterday for Me is a trainwreck moving at 5 miles per hour.

Then there’s Haru, an eccentric high school dropout with no future goals, only her love for Rikuo. They’re both so dysfunctional it’s easy to picture them sorting through their problems together like the nuanced romance in Welcome to the NHK—this is not the case with Yesterday. What we get is miles less interesting. Yesterday’s outlook on the world is bleak and hopeless, similar to that of an immature teenager struggling with adolescent melancholy. “The world sucks, I hate everyone. No one gets me.” Although the use of symbolism to convey this mood is commendable, it’s skin deep and juvenile. I must not be in the target audience because everything about this show made me want to take a permanent nap.

Rikuo immaturely believes he can’t find meaning in his life without a girlfriend’s help; This is the logic of a high schooler. Shinako has what he lacks, but if you enter a relationship expecting your partner to give you what is missing, you will be disappointed. That’s just not how life is. For a man in his mid-20s, Rikuo has more in common with a neckbeard manchild. He’s bland, frustrating, and he has less spine than a jellyfish. In response, you may say flawed people can be good characters—that’s sometimes true, but in this case, it isn’t. Rikuo never learns what is wrong with his outlook towards finding a goal. He never grows up by the end. In his own words, he is “high on the idea of being an outcast.” He is indecisive, he rarely commits to anything, he makes terrible decisions, and his behavior is inconsistent. We’ve all been there, but people change. They grow up.

One moment Rikuo will be frozen with awkwardness while Shinako talks to him, but in the next moment, he will smugly shrug off his coworker, asking who she is. Like any blank slate character, he is completely apathetic. If you can’t self-insert into this manchild wish-fulfillment fantasy, you have no reason to watch it. Despite still being in love with Shinako, he continues to lead on Haru. He is well aware that Haru is in love with him, yet he still hangs around her because he needs a backup option. Anyone who treats potential love interests like this is the scum of the Earth. If you genuinely relate to this man, consider that women aren’t objects.

As Shinako spends more time with Rikuo, inevitably, Haru gets thrown under the bus. For the latter half of the show, she becomes an afterthought. She’s proud to be his side-hoe. I’m not a fan of Haru, but it’s infuriating to watch Rikuo lead her on and treat her like a dog. Rikuo never commits to his feelings for her. However, I understand his aversion to her. Haru is supposed to be adorably persistent. Instead, she comes off as irritatingly persistent. She appears at the most convenient (or inconvenient) times. Rain or shine, night or day, she finds her way to Rikuo’s doorstep or his job, always unannounced, to intrude on his mundane life. She follows him during the night, observing him from a distance, appearing when he is alone to comfort him with reaffirming attention. Like a stalker, she always seems to know where he is. Does the writer think this is how real women act? The majority of Haru’s scenes are spent with Rikuo, talking about him, or thinking about him. With a change in music and framing, this could have easily been a horror story. For some reason, the show never calls her out on being a creepy omnipresent stalker, so we’re just supposed to accept it. Good luck getting a restraining order, Rikuo. Characters like her get created to teach the depressed loner protagonist to appreciate life and all its adventures. Her secretive past and present prevent her from being developed. The more I learned about her identity, the less I cared. She’s just not interesting. Despite Haru’s curious personality, with her pet crow perched on her shoulder, she never becomes more than an archetype. An accessory to Rikuo.

“Rikuo is an asshole. He doesn’t think about how I feel. He thinks I’m settling for being the backup. I hate that bastard!” She looked at the guy once, then fell and love, and now he treats her like a plastic bag. I’m a believer in love at first sight—this is not love. By design, Haru is a Mary Sue existing only to shower the hero with unconditional love. It’s generic, cheesy, and boring. Haru proclaims she is Shinako’s rival in the battle to win Rikuo’s heart. In that one moment, I related to Shinako. We both looked at Haru and wondered, “This girl is batshit crazy.” In the awkward conversations between Haru and Shinako, in which their words are implied rather than spoken, their awkward glances say more about the writer’s uncertainty than the characters. Neither of these characters has a personality outside of their confusing love for Rikuo. These cringe-worthy exchanges, repeated ad nauseam, are enough to embarrass any self-conscious director.

Shinako. What’s her deal? Why can’t she make up her mind? It’s been six years since her boyfriend died, and she’s still crying. She hangs around his little brother Rou, and he now has a crush on her, so it’s no wonder why she hasn’t gotten over her ex. There’s not much to say about him. Rou is possessive of Shinako. He comments about Shinako wearing make-up, suggesting he believes she might be interested in a man. When he finds Uozumi talking to her, he becomes enraged and confronts him while he’s at work. His desperation to protect her is just bald face misogyny mistaken for romantic interest. He’s a normal kid, and he develops predictably. Shinako’s indecisiveness to move on from Rou and her ex is frustrating. Her desire to help Rikuo stems from her need to help herself, which is evident to anyone except her. Her problems are of her own doing. I will sum up her entire character arc in two sentences: “It’s not you, it’s me” and “I think we should just be friends while I figure myself out.” We have all seen this archetypal character countless times, and this ancient 90s manga adaptation did nothing original. Why does Rikuo love someone so generic? That’s easy.

Early on, Shinako says, “You give the impression of someone who needs to be taken care of.”
“That might be why I like her,” Rikuo monologues. And isn’t that every man’s dream? A relationship with a woman that takes care of you for life.

There are a few background characters who furnish the scenes in between the love quadrangle interactions. They exist to prompt the main characters to exposit their life story and current feelings towards their love interests. A few side love interests pop into the show for a single episode to shake up the Love Quadrangle. After they get their miniature character arc, they’re gone forever. It’s the laziest way to get rid of a character short of randomly killing them. You’ll quickly realize their existence was just a distraction from the main plot akin to a filler episode. The script also suffers from what I call “Cafe-syndrome” in which the writer uses a cafe/restaurant whenever he needs to spoon-feed exposition to the audience. After all, this is a love story about children, except the characters look like adults to seem mature. I hate this new trend of anime about “adults” when they are indiscernible from angsty teens. Take away the cigarettes, give them school uniforms, no one would bat an eye.

The script is so artificial and contrived that not even the talented animators at DogaKobo could save it. Although, it would’ve helped to be less faithful to the manga art. The background art is drab and uninteresting. Characters’ apartments appear sparsely decorated, but the art quality is crystal clear. When the artists can design pretty backgrounds, like a grocery store, they use real photos with a gaussian blur creating a hideous effect. It’s supposed to feel artistic, but it just looks lazy. The story would’ve been more suited as a live-action adaptation because it strives to be realistic. The loose line-work on the character designs worked against this. As a stylistic choice, it made no sense. Animation requires a level of suspension of disbelief, preventing you from immersing entirely. With live-action actors, they could have captured the subtle character responses the script needed. The animation medium has done less than nothing to benefit it.

It’s not always an ugly show, but it’s always poorly produced: Rough editing, distracting staging, and an endless stream of plot contrivances that you can predict to the moment. Scenes are stitched together with too much breathing room or none at all. Within seconds the scene will change multiple times with different characters, times of day, and location. The production is incomprehensible, yet the writing is incredibly simplistic. Invariably, musical cues get used to direct the audience on how to feel. As a last-ditch effort to save the script, the music hardly elevates it beyond mediocrity. Most egregiously, to underscore pivotal moments of romance and regret. Aside from those moments, the score gets scarcely used. Awkward pauses plague the script, devoid of music as if the director was uncertain what emotion they were trying to evoke. Other times musical cues will signalize humor where there is none. Given this was adapted from a 90s manga, the comedy is pretty outdated. Exceptional audiovisuals could’ve enhanced this faux-intellectual story. Instead, the entire show felt like one long elevator ride to nowhere.

As popular as this animated mundanity has become, it’s trainwreck ending is likely critic-proof. Designed for self-insertion, an infinite number of reasons will get fabricated to excuse the vapid writing. If I can convince just one of you to look beyond the milquetoast characters and vacuous script of Sing Yesterday for Me and watch the infinitely better Welcome to the NHK instead, then my hours of boredom will have been worth it.